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by Petunia Winegum on May 6, 2015

Opinions on the man differ; opinions on the merits of his notoriety even more so; but the death of Ronnie Biggs in 2013 undoubtedly ended a chapter in British crime history. Whereas the consensus today is to condemn the Great Train Robbers as ruthless villains who left an innocent man fatally damaged by his encounter with them, it tends to be forgotten that the general view of the general public at the time of the crime was that Bruce Reynolds, Buster Edwards, Biggs and co were effectively Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

An Us & Them mood was extremely prevalent in British society before rigid class divisions gradually melted as the 1960s progressed; the working-class public identified more with the Great Train Robbers than they did with the judiciary’s grandees who sentenced them to prison, and most bemoaned the fact that the Robbers hadn’t gotten away with it. Biggs’s highly publicised escape from Wandsworth just 15 months into his sentence was cheered by the social demographic Biggs had come from, as was his career as a celebrity exile. Ronnie Biggs belonged to a period of post-war British history in which a particular kind of clever crime that required brains as much as brawn was an especially potent escape route from humble beginnings as much as boxing and football.

The recent robbery at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company, taking place over the Easter weekend, was as incongruous as it was audacious. These kind of crimes rarely happen in Britain nowadays; most of us would associate such a job with a celebrated and iconic police series such as ‘The Sweeney’ or even that most endearing of Great British heist movies, ‘The League of Gentlemen’. The Hatton Garden operation was a throwback to an age before the criminal underworld realised ill-gotten gains could be gotten without the need for a ‘blag’ – to use parlance of that age – involving a large team of specialist blaggers recruited on reputation via the underworld grapevine, with the larger the team the greater the risk of one disgruntled member turning Queen’s Evidence.

These days, criminal empires are largely built on the manufacture and sale of illicit substances; it’s not a business enterprise without risk, but the risks are considerably lower than the planning and executing of a traditional blag. Getting away with the actual robbery would not be the end of the story; there is then dividing up the rewards and deciding what to do with them whilst all the while attempting to minimise the number of individuals with enough knowledge of the project leaking any snippets of it into the wrong ears. Sitting atop a food-chain of indispensable drug dealers is a far easier way of making an illegal fortune, one that can also generate a constant flow of wealth, unlike the limited booty available in a bank vault. The growing sophistication of alarm systems to protect riches from gloved hands clutching sawn-off shotguns has also played its part in the decline of what was once one of the country’s most recurrent crimes.

The ‘Golden Age’, if it could be called such, was in the twenty years between 1963’s Great Train Robbery and 1983’s Brink’s MAT Robbery. It’s no wonder that so many British TV shows of the era would regularly feature episodes based around large-scale violent crime, with ‘The Sweeney’ in particular recognising the dramatic potential of the blag as it brought the lingo of cops and robbers into everyday slang. The biggest blags of this age included 1969’s Linwood Bank Robbery, 1971’s Baker Street Robbery and the Bank of America Robbery in 1975. There were two distinct approaches for criminals to take at this time, and the divisions between the two were usually based on the intelligence and ambition of the participants.

Those that required the robbers being ‘tooled-up’ (i.e. carrying firearms) tended to be more simplistic and impromptu in their construction, mostly born of desperation and thus negating the need for a ‘Mr Big’ to employ smart crooks to devise a plan and heavies to do the dirty work. Heavies acting on their own initiative was the classic ‘Hand over the money and nobody will get hurt’ job, generally carried out during business hours, thus maximising both the possibility of something going wrong and of innocent deaths, usually those of police officers. This happened in a particularly brutal manner during the Linwood Bank job, when two officers were shot dead point-blank by the gang’s leader. Others were more ingenious in their construction and demanded meticulous military-like preparation, such as the Baker Street Robbery, which was an after-hours affair closer to an escape from a Second World War POW camp than the more commonplace (and opportunistic) stocking-mask method. This required the digging of a 50 foot tunnel underneath the building dividing the shop from where the job was launched and the safe deposit boxes at Lloyd’s Bank, two doors down.

These operations, ones that were undertaken after months of planning, usually necessitated the employment of an ‘insider’ who could access the interior of the premises and then pass on the information. The insider factor has yet to be ruled out of the Hatton Garden job, as precise knowledge of the layout of the intended target is an essential element of an operation being carried out quickly and efficiently. Again, the numbers of people in on a job will always increase the chances of loose lips, which is why so few of the blaggers of the Golden Age got away with it in the end.

However, the collapse of an old extradition treaty between the UK and Spain in 1978 gave the villains a literal get-out-of-jail card, with hundreds of wanted men crossing the channel and establishing bases on what became colloquially known as the Costa Del Crime. The clever kingpins remained on home soil and bought Spanish villas that were handy if they needed to go on holiday quickly, whereas many who fled to the Iberian Peninsula were forced to settle there permanently, creating colonies of expat Little Englanders sticking two fingers up at Scotland Yard. This then became the regular route out of the country following a big blag, but ironically had a knock-on effect on the kind of crime blaggers specialised in; with many of the firms that had carried out the most infamous operations out of action, these became far less commonplace. The next generation of criminals capitalised on the flood of drugs into the country (and into the poorer housing estates of Britain), realising they could make far bigger profits than their predecessors without the need to gamble on a dramatic blag.

The death of Ronnie Biggs brought to an end the criminal era he belonged to, purely due to the fact that he was one of the last villains around whom a folk-hero mythology was spun in a way that no longer happens; and the difference between the generations can be measured by the length of the damage done to their victims. A drug-dealer will inflict far more long-term misery on a greater number of people than those to have lost money or jewels to a blagger. And while crime remains a get-rich-quick option for those born on the lowest rungs of Britain’s social hierarchy, it is the drugs baron who is now the role model, not the blagger. This is one reason why the Hatton Garden blag was such a surprise. The ingenuity of the team, abseiling down a lift shaft and employing industrial drills to get through several feet of reinforced concrete protecting the vault, was worthy of a movie plot; and were it not for the fact that several small businesses face ruination as a result of their endeavours, it’d be hard not to admire their bottle.

But don’t expect a majority voice expressing admiration, let alone support; we live in different times to 1963, and the fallacy of social equality promoted by the Blair administration has left its mark in the media and amongst the public. We have to be seen to condemn crime at every level as a sign that we are a classless society, that there is no longer an Us and Them – even if criminals emanating from privilege, such as those employed by the banking industry, have continued to show that crime does indeed pay.

Interesting about the “us and them” nostalgia. My memory is really that the media and the chatterati (as we would now call them) played the glamourising game of these thugs and criminals whilst I had no voice to say that these crims were sponging scum. Then they started making movies about these “heroes of the working classes” and the movie-makers sold their “romantic stories” of them falling in love and having babies and their stalwart wives who were akin to the Miners Wives. Yeah, right. The media write the “true history” and we “read all abaht it”, and the next generation then believes wot they redd.

Spot on with that one, if you look at the Angry Young Men of the 50s, Silitoe lived in Ibiza and was a friend of Graves when he wrote Saturday Night Sunday Morning, Osborne privately educated actor and the chap who wrote Room at the Top was a librarian again privately educated. Sort of fantasy working class anger.

Couldn’t agree more, Moor. I think you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head. At the time my “working class” parents, and grandparents considered the Great Train Robbers as violent thuggish scum. I wonder where Petunia Winegum gets his rose tinted spectacles from?

The opening line of this piece has been reflected in the comments so far, I think. As for events that occurred before the milkman was invited indoors, I read and I speak to those who were around before me.

Have you seen Bruce Richard Reynolds? He’s a man we’d like to find… (Alabama 3, I believe Bruce Reynolds son actually played with them on that song).

“Little Blocked Dwarf, do you see that man over there, outside the Tube station, selling flowers?” “Yes Daddy Dwarf, why?” “Well Son of My Dwarfish Loins, ‘e wos one h’of the Grate Trayne Wrobbers. ‘e makes more money selling flowers than ‘e h’ever did pulling ‘eists” (Daddy Dwarf’s RP was prone to slip back into his native cockney when confronted by his own origins or a Michael Cain films).

Strange the incidents of childhood that stick with us, that shape us. Always felt there was a lesson in that one…even when I was an active criminal myself.

Know any crims who pulled a £500,000,000,000 rip off last year Dunc?. Cos that’s what HMRC took off the mugs. Plus a scam borrowing money that can’t be repaid and an£85,000,000,000 counterfeiting sting.

The NHS along with the welfare state need to be phased out of existence. Since there are millions now dependant on both (which is the real reason both were created not out of any desire to help) the phase out will have to be very gradual but steady over say 50 years until both are gone.

But please don’t kid yourself Moor that taxes are collected for the benefit of the taxed. They are not.

“A drug-dealer will inflict far more long-term misery on a greater number of people than those to have lost money or jewels to a blagger.”

The difference, for those who failed to spot it, is that the drug dealer’s victims choose to be victims. He is supplying a demand, in the same way as Al Capone and the other bootleggers in prohibition era America supplied illicit alcohol. Make something illegal and you’ll attract criminals, it’s not rocket science, if you’ll forgive the cliché.

probably not quite so easy, drug dealers look for the vulnerable and easy to pray on individuals, once they’ve got the hooked they are on for the ride. I do voluntary work on top of a full time career and working with the homeless I see a number of addicts , they like to talk once they trust you a bit. One recently was talking to me about his decent into heroin addiction and prison, he said ” at first I thought heroin was the answer to all my problems, six months later it was a nightmare” People should feel some sympathy for some of the people many who have taken a simple wrong turn in their lives and ended up in a path of ruin. Some of the real abuses go on in fiscal fraud , easy money for criminals complex transactions to frustrate investigation, and not to much risk.

You beat me to it with that one. Having had first-hand experience of drug addiction, I can certainly assure those who haven’t that it really isn’t a ‘choice’; dealers will exploit the addiction in a way that exploiting any other sickness wouldn’t be tolerated.

Apropos the “Krays Syndrome”, the Estate I grew up on had one or two long-time Gang-meisters and the story goes that when Heroin began to arrive in the area and odd-bods that hawked it came with it, the old-time hoodlums despaired of the cops detecting, or doing much about it, and so the apocryphal story did the rounds that “oddjob” had been watched and one night, when his location was assured, his door was caved in and a full-on “police raid” took place, but without the cops. Oddjob was basically run out of “town” in a physical state that would assure he wouldn’t be coming back to that town again. The funniest aspect of the story was the legend of the white cloud emanating from the tower-block and blowing across the estate like a diminishing cloud of snow.

Whether the story was true of course, is another matter, but the cops certainly never made any big drug busts there that I have ever heard of. A neighbouring Estate was awash with the stuff mind you, so anyone already hooked wouldn’t have had to go far to find it.

I suppose it would be churlish and cynical to observe that the biggest smash and grab raid of all, by some of the most heinous, avaricious and ruthless criminals known to society, takes place tomorrow, and in broad daylight, too. Evening all….

It all seems so long ago. Accepting that there was violence at The Great Train Robbery, I later thought the sentencing a bit heavy. We can all see a difference between stealing a huge sum in cash or valuables and raiding a till, but is the sentencing balanced compared to crimes involving actual harm to victims? I understand the point made that the victims of theft may face ruin, but how many lives are cut short through the drugs trade?

I think the main reason (alongside better security)for the reduction in robbery must be the reduction in the use of cash- pensions, wages & salaries paid by BACS, the use of cash & credit cards, all must have reduced opportunity. Even the rent man & the tally man are gone.

Hard to see the City being challenged effectively while we have politicians with a bloated sense of entitlement in so many ways; expenses, revolving doors to directorships with suppliers……….

Rififi of 1955 was perhaps the most influential model for “procedural” heist films and still one of the most tense.

Also a bygone is the romantic figure of the cat burglar who seemed particularly glamorous as the thefts were often dangerous and targeting the trinkets of the very wealthy. He was killed off by the increasing use of burglar alarms and maybe to some extent by the rich not needing to keep bundles of spending money around after the credit card became more popular.

As to the Hatton Garden robbery. Could it just be like the storyline in one of the episodes of Ultimate Force, where members of the security forces, in this case the SAS, break into a vault containing safe deposit boxes, in order to recover vital terorist intelligence? In the TV programme they broke into several boxes to make it look like a real robbery and hide the real purpose of the break in.

I didn’t say I watched it, I agree absolute drivel of the first order. The idea of Ross Kemp as an SAS soldier is hilarious, and I understand that later on they are joined by a female who is somehow allowed into the regiment. I read about the series elsewhere. I haven’t watched TV or listened to the wireless since 2007.

There are surely people in all walks of life who are tempted to cheat if opportunities are on offer and lots do that. Stealing stuff from work. Arriving late. Taking false sickleave. Taking petty cash. Working expense scams. Taking long lunch breaks and coming back pissed and wasting the afternoon away. When the cheating and thieving includes danger and physical injury to anyone or the threat with a gun knife or baseball bat. Put them away and chuck the key away. They are/were not heroes at all, just itchy parasites on the back of society. A duck kennel and your wistaria pruned or your piffling money returned for a sea food snack are nothing compared to many really criminal activities. Especially on the internet, which could now mess up the whole world if Conficker had its way. Extreme naeivity afflicted those early internet scientists. They thought their lovely internet users would be as starry eyed as they were. No scheming toerags would invent worms, viruses, scams, spam and world internet fraud. Kiddie porn and nasty hacking activities to add to the list.

Biggs played a very minor role in the GTR – just tapping up Pop Agate, a retired train driver, and driving him down to the train. It turned out that Agate couldn’t operate the train so the driver was “coerced” into doing it. As to blag movies I enjoyed both Thuderbolt & Lightfoot and The Thomas Crown affair (the original naturally).

Nowadays, the ‘Master-Crim’ is likely to be a spotty-faced, late-teen, only child loner – holed up in ‘his’ bedroom of his parents’ house, in front of a myriad of PC screens, running software he’s pirated, to hack the bank accounts of companies who’d be too embarrassed to admit the kid had cracked their expensive ‘security’.

He’ll get ‘away’ with it, ‘cos the cost-of-disclosure to the company’s share price would be many times the £40k he’s siphoned off.

As a 12-year-old at the time of the Great Train Robbery, I subscribed to the ‘Robin Hood’ view – an apparently well-planned theft of ‘government’ money in vast sums (which it was then), with only marginal violence when compared to many. The heavy sentences of 30 years were certainly disproportionate, but probably reflecting the soreness of ‘the establishment’ that it was their money which they had allowed to be nicked by having such woeful security.

The reports of the more recent Hatton Garden heist set me wondering what sort of robbery does it have to be to qualify as a ‘heist’ ? Is it dictated by the amount involved, the cunning of the robbers or merely the whim of the tabloid reportage ?

My first job after leaving school was as a bank clerk at the Westminster Bank in Chiswick. There were no counter screens, just a wide counter. Soon after I started there we had workmen in to install a new strongroom door. Maybe one of the workmen spoke out of turn, but one sleepy Monday morning at around 11 o’clock I was sitting in the strongroom making sure the builders didn’t help themselves to anything when there was a commotion upstairs and one of my colleagues appeared before me, glasses askew and with a size ten footprint on the side of his face. He said two words as he rushed past me in an effort to find somewhere to hide- “Bank raid!” It was all over in seconds. I pieced together what happened. Three men burst into the bank armed with the popular weapon of choice- a washing up bottle full of ammonia, which was aimed into the faces of the bank staff. One of my friends looked up open mouthed and swallowed a mouthful. There were no screens so the robbers vaulted the counter, catching my colleague on the side of the face on the way. They scooped up handfuls of cash from the cash drawers, leapt back over the counter and were out of the door before anyone had a chance to react. The police were there within minutes and I’m told the thieves were arrested before the day was out.

Another team of workmen arrived next day and a screen was in place before the close of business.

It was the end of an era. Ammonia wouldn’t penetrate armoured glass so they tooled up.

Just thinking of the ‘Lavender Hill Mob’. It brings the chronology of the article back a good ten years and disrupts its class suggestions. I think even the most upright citizen somewhere in the back of his mind loves the idea of a good ‘blag’.

On the recent Hatton Garden job, my bet is on clever eastern Europeans. It is the sort of criminal activity that could be undertaken without disturbing the drugs ‘patch’ of established criminals. It also seems to have involved an incredible lot of technical know-how. Certainly overqualified and underrenumerated eastern Europeans have made a modus operandi of the extremely complicated business of cash machine skimming in recent years.

There’s a somewhat bizarre movie from 1958 called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Money_%28film%29 , which is predicated on a very respectable-looking upwardly-mobile newly-suburban working-class family, who are all criminals and come home each night after a good days blagging on the streets of London. The wiki-history suggests that maybe it was made around the same time as the Lavender Hill Mob. “Once the film was completed its release was delayed for several years because Sir John Davis did not believe it was sufficiently funny.”